Be Generous and Become Wealthy

People say they are generous, but most are not. Donations are not necessarily the same as being generous. I donate our household items to Goodwill that we no longer need. I make sure I keep the receipt so that I can receive a tax deduction for my donation.

There is nothing generous about donating my neglected things. Generosity costs us something. I know a very few select people that I would call generous. Let me describe what I believe generosity looks like.

Seth Godin
I shared a bowl of rice with Seth Godin. He prepared the rice in his rice cooker for 60 people attending his workshop. He could have ordered take-out. He could have left for lunch to get some time away from the crowd. Instead, he stayed and played the host as he served his new friends a healthy meal. He turned the meeting room into his living room as if we were all dinner guests invited into his home.

Why was this generous? Yes, it cost him some of his time and money, but mostly it cost him the human act of warmly serving another, “You first.” Generosity requires a human connection, eyeball to eyeball, life on life. I wish you could have been there.

Billionaires and Hammers
A friend of mine gave a few hundred thousand dollars to sponsor the tuition for 300 men to attend a retreat in Volcano National Park. He wanted to remove finances from the list of reasons why guys might not attend. He was generous so the guy swinging a hammer for a living didn’t have to say, “I can’t afford it.”

That same friend spends every day with billionaires. He is a witness to the gap between the upper 1% and a construction worker. Knowing how lopsided the world can be, his generosity leveled the playing field for the weekend. Generosity was the price of admission for every blue collar, hammer-swinging, neglected, forgotten, disrespected, honorable man that sat in that auditorium.

It worked. 300 guys attended and less than 15 of them paid for their ticket. “Let every guy know his ticket wasn’t free. It was paid for by someone.” Paid in full, it cost him something, but he gave it freely without a requirement for something in return.
I wish you could have been there to see their smiles.

Be generous and you will become wealthy.

This post is an excerpt from the Field Guide: 99 Ways to Navigate Your Best Life. Download the full guide here.

99 Ways to Navigate Your Best Life No 21 Be Generous

Our Compliance is Not Their Fault

Most people sign an unwritten contract every day.

We trade a paycheck for predictability.

Does your arrangement go something like this?

Boss, you give me a predictable every-two-week paycheck, health insurance, projects to work on, lunch breaks, and a Christmas party, and I’ll give you my will, my dignity, my freedom of choice, my security, my sleep, and my future plans for my life.

Like the indentured servant, most employees take on the goals of the crown—the company and the customers—as their priority instead of their own goals. Creating great products and building great companies are wonderful ways to invest in a career, but at what expense?

Too often the objectives of the kingdom—the company—become the only mission. What you want, what you need, or what you value is rarely included in the company’s quarterly objectives.

How frequently have you been asked in your quarterly or annual review,

How is the company treating you?

What can the company do for you?

How can the company help make you a more content, enthusiastic, invigorated, challenged contributor?

The problem is that you have made a trade, an agreement:

You work for them and they believe that their mission—regardless of your feelings about it—should be fulfilling to you.

You will never offer your best if you are constantly editing yourself to keep in step with the contract you signed.

We can end up yielding so much of our true selves that we subject ourselves to emotional tyranny.

Isn’t it true that fear is the driving force behind our compliance?

If we hold conflicting views with our company or leadership, if we desire more than what is offered in the trade, we fear the consequences of standing up for what we desire and believe.

I owe this realization to a coworker.

We were taking a walk in the parking lot together outside of our office when he told me,

“I get it. I sign a contract and accept the terms of the agreement every time I cash a paycheck.”

He was right.

I had a business dealing that accurately depicted this type of contract. It was a contractual agreement between three parties that totaled seven figures over five years.

One of the parties never signed the contract, but they cashed the checks each year for their portion of the compensation.

After a few years the attorneys concluded that even though this party never signed the contract, they were acting according to the contract terms and receiving compensation for doing so.

Therefore, cashing the check was as good as signing the piece of paper.

MY compliance WAs not their fault.

THE UNWRITTEN CONTRACT

Cashing the check is as good as signing the contract.

By cashing my check every two weeks, I was agreeing with the terms of my employment even though I wasn’t externally condoning or agreeing with those terms. I had to take ownership of my participation in the dysfunctional system.

I could no longer blame or point fingers.

I had to become a part of the solution or stop cashing the checks.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

How Long Will We Be Working?

It was very common for our grandparents to find a good company and hitch their wagon to it for the next thirty years.

In the post-depression and post-WWII era, finding predictable work was a blessing.

If you were able to work for a company like Ford Motor Company, then you were enrolled in their retirement pension plan.

This golden handcuff tethered you to the company until you reached retirement age, but your contract was mutually beneficial: the company benefited from your investment and you benefited from a reliable income source for the rest of your life.

That has all changed.

Saving for Retirement: We’re going to be working for a while.

Imagine that last week you attended your company’s retirement plan meeting. The young thirty-something presenter showed a chart proclaiming how the stock market boasts a predictable 30-year average rate of return of 10%.

For the last 15 years, however, you’ve only experienced down markets. You follow the advertised best practices, contributing your faithful (x)% every month. but you know that your retirement plan is not the golden handcuff it once was.

Indeed, the Ford Motor Company’s pension plan model vanished with our grandparents’ generation. And the promise of the stock market producing wild amounts of wealth with which we can travel the world and eat caviar does not seem to be panning out, either.

Maybe we shouldn’t try and stay with one company?

The belief that our company’s retirement plan will provide a guaranteed path to financial security is not anything you should count on. Instead, we should accept that you will be working for more years than the thirty-something presenter promised in that meeting.

Let’s not feel obligated to stick it out with any one company for our entire career.

The good news is that when the pension plan vanished, employees received greater freedom of choice. We can make career decisions largely independent of a company retirement plan.

Since most of us won’t end up in early retirement, we should certainly make sure our work is fulfilling.

We are going to be at it for a while and there is no payoff for hanging on to one company.

We are free to choose where to invest your skills and talents.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

Why Serve Forty Years of Hard Labor?

In medieval times, indentured servants worked the land of a king for a fixed number of years until their debt was paid in full.

The king owned the field, the crop and the harvest yield.

He got rich, he ate and drank as much as he liked, and the servants learned to live on the crumbs from his table.

Kings love servants and minions.

Does this sound familiar to you?

For many people work can be a place where they feel like indentured servants. It

can be a place where they feel obligated and stuck.

Many companies and leadership teams have this same ancient mentality.

They believe that their employees are lucky to work for them.

They believe that each worker is a replaceable cog.

They are looking for compliant workers and employees, who, under the weight of needing to meet their own financial obligations, settle in for forty years of hard labor.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Why approach your workday with this kind of obligation?

I was an Indentured Servant

I realized that my truest desire was for a partnership, not an obligation. I dreamed of being in a business arrangement where the company and I were equally investing in each other.

Believe it or not, it is possible. I found that part of the problem was that I was acting like a factory worker or an indentured servant. In fact, I was training other workers around me to relate to me as a replaceable cog.

Once I could name and describe this arrangement I could begin to navigate and craft a new arrangement. I stopped thinking and acting like an indentured servant and I started being a skilled craftsman instead.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

Unravel What the World Has Taught You

Madness or Brilliance?
Madness or Brilliance?

Do you remember watching the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire ?

Remember Tom Cruise playing the slick sports agent whose career implodes in a single afternoon?

In the first three minutes of the movie we get the Cliffs Notes of his life. He has spent years working for the most successful sports management company of his day. He is fierce and suave, and he is dying inside.

In his words, he had become “another shark in a suit.”

One night, just before his corporate conference, he finds himself at a moral crossroads, a point of breakthrough. During his wrestling—his epiphany—he does headstands in his hotel room and unravels what he had previously learned about the world.

He starts writing a mission statement

He is not merely writing a memo, he realizes, but a mission statement. A suggestion for the future. In it, he advocates a provocative concept to his coworkers: charge less money, take on fewer clients, and give more personal attention. In the next scene we see him running 110 bound copies of his manifesto, title page and all, and stuffing them one by one into his colleagues’ in-boxes.

He calls it “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business.”

Jerry Maguire is alive again.

His mission statement makes him famous, but for all the wrong reasons.

His peers smile as they make eye contact from across the conference room while making sure not to stand close enough to catch the career-suicide bug that they knew had surely infected him.

Soon Jerry is fired and leaves the office with his mission statement in one hand and the goldfish, his only heretic recruit, in the other.

OK. To be fair, the cute secretary comes with him, as well. She can’t resist a man of principle.

What does Jerry Maguire have to do with me? 

Everything. What you are reading now is a mission statement. Not merely a memo, but a suggestion for the future. You awoke to your in-box stuffed full of my sweat-stained declaration of independence.

This is a manifesto. A coup d’état. A sudden illegal overthrow.

I am inviting you to unravel what the world has taught you about your work, your career, and your future.   

I may end up being the lonely guy holding a goldfish with no one following me. But, like Jerry, I’m willing to run the risk.

I’ve lived too long following the rules and expecting the outcome to match the promises.

It hasn’t worked.

*Expert from eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

For your complete free copy download here.

Free eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

Download Your FREE copy
This is an invitation to unravel what the world has taught you.

Early praise for Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss.

“This absolutely beautiful book is a true whack of the truth on the side of your career.”

Seth Godin, Author The Icarus Deception

“I loved this book. Reader beware: this book will call you out and into your best work.”

Jeff Goins, Author, Wrecked

“This brave book helps you cast aside the unwritten contract of compliance and take control to start living the life you really want.”

Clay Hebert, co-founder WorkHacks

“Revolutionary. McHugh pulls the string that unravels a person and leaves them only with hope.”

Morgan Snyder, Author, Become Good Soil

Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss. is for you if…

1. You want to enjoy going to work each day.

2. You feel confident that your career is too important to approach with apathy.

3. You want to gain greater influence at work.

4. You’re ready to explore new alternatives for finding recognition for your work.

After reading, you’ll be able to:

1. Establish a unique strategy for firing your boss.

2. Know how to obtain the freedom to offer your best in any job.

3. Understand why quitting your job won’t help you.

The Free offer

I am giving this book away for free.

No strings attached.

Yes, absolutely free. That means:

  • No email address required.
  • No hoops to jump through.
  • You can forward it to anyone you’d like.

And yes, I know this is a bad way (in theory) to “build a platform.”

If you want more, you’ll come back.

CLICK HERE

Why Your Work Should be Art?

I have a fierce commitment to the belief that our Work is our Art.

What we do and most especially how we do it can either be stiff robotic toil or deeply human and poetic.

By pouring our heart, soul and passion into our Work it becomes Art.

Your not an Artist if…

Sadly, Work is simply toil for most people.  I believe there are two converging elements that make this reality occur.

Required ingredients (external factors):

#1 Take one part bad Work Environment with a double heaping of Bad Leadership.

That alone can make it tough to view your Work as your Art.

You instead are stuck watching the clock, trying to keep your head low and out of harms way.

Attitude is your contribution

There is an equal part ingredient that you add, Attitude (internal factor).

#2 Heaping portions of bad interpretations and blame

-They made me feel this way.

-They don’t inspire me.

-I am not excited about what I do.

“Art is not a gene or a specific talent.”

Seth Godin says it very well in his new book The Icarus Deception. Taken from the Amazon expert.

What are you afraid of?  The old rules: Play it safe. Stay in your comfort zone. Find an institution, a job, a set of rules to stick to. Keep your head down. Don’t fly too close to the sun.The new truth: It’s better to be sorry than safe. You need to fly higher than ever.

In his bravest and most challenging book yet, Seth Godin shows how we can thrive in an econ­omy that rewards art, not compliance. He explains why true innovators focus on trust, remarkabil­ity, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art.

Art is not a gene or a specific talent. It’s an attitude, available to anyone who has a vision that others don’t, and the guts to do something about it. Steve Jobs was an artist. So were Henry Ford and Martin Luther King Jr.

To work like an artist means investing in the things that scale: creativity, emotional labor, and grit. The path of the artist isn’t for the faint of heart—but Godin shows why it’s your only chance to stand up, stand out, and make a difference.

The time to seize new ground and work without a map is now. So what are you going to do?

Start making Art and stop making excuses.

References:

  • Kickstarter campaign where The Icarus Deception was funded.  Watch the video. 
  • Mike Field-Artist turned clothing line creator merging Sport, Life and Art together.  Podcast to follow.

In the Social Era, the Little Guy has a Powerful Vote

I had a recent interaction with my friend and fellow
Seth Godin Medicine Baller, @Nilofer.

She writes for the Harvard Business Review and recently wrote about
Rules For the Social Era (#SocialEra).

Nilofer Merchant

Big Brands Don’t Always Get It

In this article she talks us through the dichotomy of choices that the big brands of our lives are making.  From Bank of America and ING Direct to Blockbuster and Netflix she helps outline how the rules have changed.

She is kind to say that she has not lost hope in some of these powerhouse labels, I’m not willing to give up on these firms.  Referring to those brands that seem to have fallen asleep at the Social Economy wheel.

There was one key element that stuck out to me as I read about her take on the new Era of the Social Economy.

The Little Guy has a powerful vote.

Remember Netflix and Qwikster?

We are all familiar with the story of from a year ago where Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, raises subscriber fees and their stock price falls 60% in two months.

Even with millions of subscribers they missed the simple fact that their Tribe was the reason for their success.  It was not their number of movie titles or their branding, it was the fact that people became believers in the little guy.

Little People Unite

Often over-throwing a government happens because an army of little people unite with purpose and passion.

After years of being stuck with late fees from Blockbuster, Netflix was able to harness the patriotism of anti-blockbuster sentiments.

They thought that because they had a great product that meant they could go act
like a big company and do anything they wanted.

In the Social Economy, the little guy has a powerful vote.

Insert VETO

The Little Guy, the Tribe, the people who put you on the map.
We vote, NO.  

In the financial markets they say Past performance does not guarantee future results.

But we know that history repeats itself as well.

So who is next?  

Who is the next Netflix?

Who has created a huge and loyal Tribe, but is already forgetting the army of little people that put them on the throne?

What arrogant CEO will be apologizing next?

You can find more information on Nilofer @ nilofermerchant.com
Join 18K others and follow her @Nilofer on Twitter.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Learning How to Swing for Cheap

“I figured out how to swing cheap“. Clay Hebert

I was on the phone with @Clayhebert and I couldn’t help but write down this quote.  In today’s electronic world most of what you need to get started is already free or cheap.  It means that you do not have to wait to save $1000.00 or $10,000.00 to get started on your idea.

I remember in the early 90’s when the idea of having your own website would require that you fork over $5K to get four pages.  Today, in three minutes for free.

So much of what once required a specialist, now only requires an internet connection and your PC.

The below tools are some that my team have been using.  I hope you find them useful.

Change This-has a great list of manifestos e-books authors include: Seth Godin, Hugh MacLeod, and more.

Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com has some practical tools like: PowerPoint slides for investors, Business Plan Outline & Operating Income Plan Excel sheets.

$100 Startup is a new book from Chris Guillebeau.  Start with watching his video.

What are you starting on?

Who are you? Do you know?

It is such an imperative question to ask.  And your first answer will not be entirely accurate.

It is so difficult to see your own skills, talents, and uniqueness clearly.  We are aware of those collections of amazing elements that make us “You”.  But we lack the intricacy of insight required to fully comprehend our bigness, our own recipe that makes up our “special sauce”.

We need trusted advisers to assist us in crafting the laser precision summary of “Who am I?”

Don’t misunderstand me.  I know who I am at a macro level.  But when I start tracking down to a micro level, I need some help.

This was my quest beginning in 2011.  I needed to be able to communicate “Who am I?  What do I make, invent, and pioneer? Why is it important?  Am I any good at it?

Those questions drove me to ask questions of the few people I respected the most in the space of Work.  And the prerequisite was I had to trust their belief and heart for me.  That cocktail combination of respect for them and trust in their intentions for me was powerful.

I asked those trusted advisers to get out their red ink pen and start lighting up my first cut answers to these questions.  There was more red than black.  And it was beautiful.

They helped me extract from the marrow of my life “Who I am.”  Notice it was no longer a question.  A period was inserted and it became a statement.

I am under renovation and always improving, inventing, editing and dreaming.

I am becoming dangerously clear on who I am, what I do and why it matters.

Start asking the question.  It will disrupt the trajectory of your life.